She flies through the air (and glides on the track) with the greatest of ease...

As you know, the first 2 bout posters featured 2 of our actual skaters.  By the time the third bout rolled around, drawing a derby girl started to become a bit of a tradition.  However, instead of selecting the skater myself (as I had done with Millie and Pink), I decided to take a vote and let the league choose for themselves.

It basically works like this:  League members send me their votes after each bout for who they would like to see featured next.  All members (skaters, refs, NSOs and the coach) are allowed to vote on whoever they'd like, except for the skaters who have already been featured that season.  The winner isn't revealed to anyone until the poster is finished.

Now the powers that be (meaning our bout committee), decided to call our third bout "Battle Under the Big Top."  It should be fairly obvious then what our theme was :)  While we can't always provide half-time entertainment relative to the theme, we managed to find circus performers to put on a show for us.  Jugglers, balloon animals, acrobatics and comedy acts...it was a good time and the kids really seemed to enjoy it.

Anyway, the vote for our poster girl was pretty much unanimous because one of our skaters has some circus experience!  And that's Give 'Em L!

She really does have those stockings and socks...And I have no clue how she manages to keep those glasses on her face!

From the rough sketch...

 
To the final bout poster!

That's right...she's riding an effin' lioness!

 I was going for an antiqued, old-fashioned circus poster in the flyer design.  At this size it's hard to see it, but the background has an aged paper texture.  For some reason I found it highly amusing that I wound up drawing a lioness for a roller derby poster.  And don't think that I wasn't tempted at some point to draw some skates on that thing ;)

As you can see from the rough pencils, L and the lioness were initially drawn together.  After I scanned it in, I decided to draw the two as separate images that could be easily rearranged as needed to fit the composition.  Plus, I figured that L might appreciate having a drawing of herself sans lioness, just in case :)  Besides, If I ever decide to, I can re-use the lioness for some other design, seeing as how we have 2 of them adorning our league logo.

Ah, and I almost forgot my little plug!  In addition to being just an all-around awesome person, L is also the author of a newly released children's book!  It's called Eight Days Gone and is about Apollo 11's mission to the moon!  Apparently the Reading Rainbow folks have also recently purchased the rights to the digital version for their online app!  Go get yourself (and all the kids in your life) a copy now!  RIGHT NOW :)